Tesla displays Optimus next to two of its vehicles at the World Robot Conference in Beijing on Aug. 22, 2024.
CNBC | Evelyn
Tesla’s vice president of Optimus robotics, Milan Kovac, said on Friday that he’s leaving the company.
In a post on X, Kovac thanked Tesla CEO Elon Musk and reminisced about his tenure, which began in 2016.
“I want to thank @elonmusk from the bottom of my heart for his trust and teachings over the decade we’ve worked together,” Kovac wrote. “Elon, you’ve taught me to discern signal from noise, hardcore resilience, and many fundamental principles of engineering. I am forever grateful. Tesla will win, I guarantee you that.”
Tesla is developing Optimus with the aim of someday selling it as a bipedal, intelligent robot capable of everything from factory work to babysitting.
In a first-quarter shareholder deck, Tesla said it was on target for “builds of Optimus on our Fremont pilot production line in 2025, with wider deployment of bots doing useful work across our factories.”
During Tesla’s 2024 annual shareholder meeting, Musk characterized himself as “pathologically optimistic,” then claimed the humanoid robots would lift the company’s market cap to $25 trillion at an unspecified future date.
In recent weeks, Musk told CNBC’s David Faber that Tesla is now training its Optimus systems to do “primitive tasks,” like picking up objects, open a door or throw a ball.
Competitors in the space include Boston Dynamics, Agility Robotics, Apptronik, 1X and Figure.
Kovac had previously served as the company’s director of Autopilot software engineering. He rose to lead the company’s Optimus unit as vice president in 2022.
Musk personally thanked Kovac for his “outstanding contributions” to the business.
Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.